By Rev. Glenn Neil Stocking
Gold and white, or blue and black. It’s all in our individual perception. All the buzz in social media this week over the colors of a dress demonstrates a basic challenge in human relationships. Clearly, even when presented with the exact same information, our individual interpretations can produce dramatically different conclusions.
It seems that for almost every question there are at least two viable options and camps of supporters for both. In his nineteenth century illuminations on ethics, John Stuart Mill described the term “Utilitarianism” as basically falling similarly into two camps, Rule utilitarianism and Act utilitarianism, allowing for a universe of moderations in between.
On the one hand a society is best served by establishing a well thought through set of rules that when followed unerringly by all would create the most happiness for the most people. The polar opposite forgoes establishing formal rules allowing that individual acts are judged by their effect on society. The latter position allows for circumstances to guide values while the former simply demands adherence.
Reasonable people quickly agree that neither position in its extreme is perfect for all occasions. Some formal legal system is required to conduct commerce and maintain a level playing field in complicated social structures. Two farmers however, should be able to trade some grain for a pig with a simple hand shake if both are agreeable to the terms.
Each of us is free to see the dress as gold and white, black on blue or some other combination because we have accepted something between “rule” and “act” utilitarianism. If we agreed that the designer’s proclamation that the dress is blue and black established the only accepted interpretation, the gold and white camp would be in violation of the rule.
The gold and white camp would then be left with two choices; deny the evidence of its own eyes or live in violation of the rule. The former solution provides fodder for a lifetime of therapy, the latter leads to deterioration of respect for the rule and rules in general and eventually anarchy. From this simple example it becomes clear that a strict “rule” society is bound for self-destruction by its self-imposed rigidity.
Our spiritual nature is “rule” based and has only one rule, Love. This core rule allows our human experience to be the chaotic adventure it is because Love can only give us what we expect to receive, and its first gift is freedom. We have freely created our own anarchy by denying the core rule.
Who we are may seem to be an accident of fate, but only if we define ourselves in terms of what we believe and how we perceive the world we live in. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. When we forget that truth and become immersed in the world of effects enveloping us we surrender to the idea of fate. Remembering our faith, our true nature, provides an avenue back to self-determination.
When through our exercise of choice we judge the acts of others by their effect on society, whether or not the result is more happiness, we move back toward the core rule. A couple who choose to share their lives and contribute to their community may do so in violation of some human sourced moral standing, but that standing aside do no harm and much good. This is demonstrating love, the core rule. The act is beneficial, the rule if strictly enforced would harm the couple and provide no appreciable benefit to society.
The rule of love gives us freedom because nothing else would be love. Freedom gives us anarchy because nothing else would be freedom. It is no wonder then that life is a paradox. Spirit or God if you prefer, set us free to find our own way home with no manual or directions. We have the basic intelligence of the universe because we are all expressions of the One Mind, and we have the freedom to use our universal wisdom or deny it.
Whether the dress is one color or another is hardly important. How we choose to accept the interpretation of others is. Are we willing to allow the same value to the interpretations of others as we assign to our own? Does one cause harm and the other not? Is any perceived harm real or simply a violation of someone’s rule? What does the rule of Love demand?
Our freedom to choose may seem a cruel joke when we consider the Universe could have made us adherent to its core rule and saved a history of strife. But what history would there be then if instead of our freedom we were created to conform. Spirit itself is required to conform to its only rule and created us as a means to explore the consequences of freedom.
Our history is often marked by our blunders but also by our triumphs. Every heroic odyssey starts with a disruption of the norm. We heroically stand one more time than we are knocked down and do so over and over again. The Rule of Love is our undeniable core. We have strayed from it on a million roads and travel millions more seeking our return.
We can all agree it is a dress. We can agree that there appear to be two principle colors in its palette. If we start there and understand that everything else is subject to personal interpretations fueled by vastly different experiences, perhaps we can choose to be guided by the only rule that matters, the one that created us all.
Is Spirit doomed by its rigid adherence to its one rule? Only if unconditional love can ever be wrong. Spirit is infinite and thus immortal. What appears as chaos from our limited perspective is simply a neutral element within the greater soul.
Learn more about your true nature, your freedom to choose and the Rule of Love at a Center for Spiritual Living in your community or on line starting at CSL.org or CSLFTL.org.